My roommate Jon, Bigfoot and S1K

I wasn't sure what to do with this story. If I wrote this as a column, some of the details would make people think I was trying to be funny. But it's not funny. It is, but only in the way life is. Comedy is all around us, even in sadness.

And either way, it's way too long to be a column. It's probably way too long to be a blog post. All I know is; I have to tell it.

Suite 1000, the S1K

My freshman year of college, I lived in this place called Morrill Tower. One of two towers that overlook the famous horseshoe of Ohio Stadium, Morrill was sort of built as a honeycomb around a central pillar. Inside this honeycomb, students lived in "suites" where between 7-8 students would live around a central living room.

I lived in Suite 1000, the S1K as residents called it. Whoever out there is in charge of testing student compatibility to place them together in dorm rooms went above and beyond for this one.

I'll never know what sort of algorithm they used or when exactly they mapped out my entire personality, all I know is this: the seven guys they placed in that room were, to a man, complete misfits. I mean straight from central casting. I mean the type of guys that form a ragtag baseball team and win the championship at the last minute with some crazy trick play they'd just invented. That level of misfittery. There were seven of us.

Starting in the single room was Casey, a guy who no one ever saw except when he entered the suite late at night, closed his door, and blasted R.Kelly as loud as his speakers were capable. When he was later booted out of school for beating a girlfriend none of us knew he had, he was replaced by Chad, a sociable enough guy who just happened to look like Beaker from the Muppets.

Next came myself and my roommate Stinky Dave. Dave took 14 showers over the course of the year. We know because we counted, because after every shower the gut-wrenching stink that filled his side of the room dissipated and took up residence in the bathroom.

Then came Phil and Strickland. Phil was a skinny suburban kid who recorded and released some truly awful (although intentionally awful, and thus hilarious) rap music over the Internet under the nom de plume Pimp Daddy Welfare. Strickland was so into video games that he once skipped a party because he had just purchased the video game Metal Gear Solid. Many were the nights we wondered how he had a girlfriend and why she put up with spending night after night watching him play Playstation.

Finally, Chris and John. Chris was the self-proclaimed leader of the Schordockracy, a small group of people bent on complete global domination. Just in case you think they're not capable of accomplishing this, they are, as a group, planning on scaling Mt. Kilimanjaro next year. It's not the world, but it's a start.

And finally, Jon. Jon was always a mystery. Still is, for the most part. Jon never left the room; never left the chair, come to think of it. Despite that, he was in remarkably good shape. Quiet, reserved, mysterious, Jon would spend his days scouring the Internet for rare Prince mp3s. He was a giant Prince fan.

He was really close to his dad.

He wouldn't say a word, and then he'd suddenly have us all come into his room so he could sing Madonna's "Borderline" at the top of his lungs.

He wouldn't indicate he even noticed me in the room half the time, and then he'd ask if I wanted to go grab some lunch. Then we'd sit and eat in silence. Painful, awkward, mouth-full-of-dorm-cafeteria food silence.

He was always kind of a puzzle, which makes the way he died even more mysterious.

Bigfoot and Jesus

Eventually, everyone in the S1K dorm parted ways, as roommates must. Strickland, Jon and Chris all shared an apartment on the south side of campus. Dave didn't come back to school the next year, heading home to his native Virginia. Chad went to live in the basement of some house he shared with four women. Phil bought a condo not far from where I went to middle school. I'd go over to one of their places every once in a while, but I had new roommates by then. Still, we'd all gotten pretty tight over that year we all spent together, and we'd at least make the effort to watch wrestling pay per views together once a month.

Then, graduation.

Prior to facebook, I'd pretty much lost track of all of them. For the most part they all stayed in Ohio, except for Phil, who moved to Japan to teach English.

I came down here.

I'd e-mail Phil every once in a while when I'd find some YouTube video of a drunk college kid singing along to a Pimp Daddy Welfare song. Chris and I started a website together devoted to comedy writing and both promptly lost interest in it.

Apart from occasionally e-mailing Chris, I didn't hear from anyone.

Then, one day about three years ago, Chris laid a story on me I nearly couldn't believe.

Jon had always been weird. But apparently in the years after graduation it had gotten worse. He'd gotten into strange stuff: conspiracy theories about Bigfoot and Jesus and aliens. He'd really been buying into it, spending all his free time researching it on some of the crazier corners of the Internet. He'd become convinced that Bigfoot still roams the Pacific Northwest, and that finding Bigfoot might somehow hold some key to the existence of a living Jesus Christ.

He'd gotten so into it that he'd run away to live in the Pacific Northwest, alone out in the woods trying to find Bigfoot. He'd just gotten on a Greyhound with the money in his pocket and a strange, sad set of convictions running around in his head.

This is the part I was worried about writing. I'm not trying to be funny, I'm not making this up. There are plenty of people who believe in this stuff. Sometimes people just get something stuck in their head and it won't go away, no matter how crazy it sounds.

It was in Jon's head so deep that he had left in the middle of the night one evening and had never come back.

I finally got the straight story from Strickland, since he was the one who'd stayed in closest contact with Jon and had actually been the one that drove him to the bus station.

"That is a very true and sad story. Thought about telling someone to see if he could get some help or something, but he wasn't a threat to himself or others (in fact he wasn't even remotely suicidal, he was excited to live off the grid) He got kinda hyper-religious...but other than that there was really not anything awkward. He actually said he was coming back and I was supposed to be holding his stuff for him (most of his personal stuff is sitting in my mom's basement). He gave me about 300 books about aliens, conspiracy's, secret societies, all kinds of weird (stuff). I read a few here and there, but I'm terrified I'm going to read the exact combination he did and end up in the woods living with a tribe of sub-terrainan Sasquatches. He sold 80% of his stuff on craiglist for pennies on the dollar, and gave me whatever he couldn't sell, he decided to do all this in like a weeks time. I thought he was kidding at first...but then realized he wasn't when he asked for a ride downtown to the greyhound station. He sold his car and everything. He got on a Greyhound one day and hasn't come back. Not sure when this was exactly, a few years ago by now."

Apart from Strickland, he hadn't told anyone he was leaving.

Not even his parents. Not even his dad, with whom he'd been so close.

He was just gone.

Facebook and obituaries

The wonderful thing about facebook is that it lets you reach out to people from your distant past and catch up with them. The awful thing about facebook is the exact same thing.

Instead of being crystallized forever, frozen in amber as perfect memories, all of those faces from long ago grow old, get married, have kids, get divorced, see the world. And seeing all those faces getting older just reminds us that we're getting older.

Chad got bald. He still looks like Beaker, though.

Dave, after leaving Virginia, ran a Radio Shack before joining the Army. He did a few tours and now works for the Federal Reserve. He's married and has a lovely wife, which tell me at some point he started showering.

Phil pinballed back and forth from Japan, stepping back into his role at Pimp Daddy Welfare to record a few more albums and do a few shows back in Columbus. He finally settled in Japan, where he works for Brunswick (the bowling company) translating for their CEOs.

Strickland works for the feds now as well, investigating insurance fraud.

Chris is married, travels the country repairing computer systems for nursing homes all over, and maintains an alarming number of side projects, including a line of mp3 files featuring erotic post-hypnotic suggestions. And also he's going to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro.

And then there's Jon, the constant mystery. Every time another S1K alum would sign up for facebook and we'd all reconnect, that would be one of the first things they'd hear about: That Jon had gone off to live in the woods and look for bigfoot.

And so that's how it stayed for the longest time: Jon became our "whatever-happened-to" story. He stayed crystallized forever, frozen in amber as the crazy, quiet one who flipped out one day and ran off into the woods.

It almost became a joke. I mean, how could it not be a joke? Every time someone told the story, it almost seemed like something Jon might have done as an elaborate prank: pretend to flip out and move into the woods. Then actually move to Cleveland or somewhere.

If you knew the guy who'd invite you out to lunch and then not say a word to you, you'd know the guy who might just pull a prank like this.

Then, one day out of the blue, the following from Chris:

Hey, I was doing some Google searches on a whim and came across this:

WILLITS, Calif. (AP) - Authorities in northern California say human remains found in a wooded area last week have been identified as those of an Ohio man.

A spokesman for the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department says forensic testing has confirmed the man's identity as Jonathan Owens of Columbus.

The family of the 29-year-old says they hadn't heard from Owens since last April. A cause of death has not been determined, but authorities say there's no evidence of foul play. It's not clear why Owens was in the Willits, California, area, but investigators say he had been traveling the country by hitchhiking and taking buses.

His body was discovered by a cross-country bicyclist.

The story, it turned out, was three years old. Jon, or someone with the same name, had been dead for three years and none of us had known.

Now, the journalist in me immediately starts figuring out next moves. Before I have a typed response to Chris, I'm on the phone with the Mendocino police department. There are other reports on the same body, bearing the name of a Lieutenant, now a captain. He seems agitated at being asked by some nobody from across the country to dig up a three-year-old cold case. All he can tell me is that this Jon was definitely from Columbus.

I hit up the Columbus Dispatch archives, scroll through the obituaries and there it is. Chris heads to the Columbus library site and finds the full obituary.

OWENS Jonathan "Cory" Owens, 28, died Wednesday, February 14, 2007, in Mendocino County, Calif. Born October 17, 1978, in Lima, Oh., the son of Johnnie Owens and Geneva Carol (Godsey) Owens of Lima, Oh. Jonathan had worked for K-Mart, Lima, Oh. and Ambercrombie & Finch, Columbus, Oh. He was a 1997 graduate and honor student of Lima Senior High School and attended Ohio State University in Columbus for 4 years. He was an artist and a musician and enjoyed electronics, especially computers. Preceded in death by brother Brian Godsey, paternal grandparents Elliot and Emma Owens, maternal grandparents Claude and Phyllis Godsey. Survived by father, Johnnie Owens of Lima, Oh.; mother, Geneva Carol (Godsey) Owens of Lima, Oh.; sister, Patrice (Dan) Reinhart of Lima, Oh.; a host of aunts, uncles and cousins. Visitation 12Noon-2 p.m. Saturday, February 24, 2007, CHAMBERLAIN-HUCKERIEDE FUNERAL HOME, Lima, Oh., where Memorial Service will be held 2 p.m. Saturday with John Barcus and Rev. Ernest Stephens officiating.

It's an odd feeling. It's not sadness; it's entirely too strange and ridiculous to be sad. But it's not that funny, either. You read that obituary and you see he lost a brother before he died.

He was really close to his dad, and maybe that's why.

And now, that's two children his parents have lost.

Chris said he's going to try to contact his parents and see if there's a gravesite or anything. He'd lived with Jon for a year before I'd know them, and for a year after we all moved away. They were friends, or at least as close to friends as you can get to someone who is always such a mystery.

We're all debating whether to give them what's in the box. After three years, the scars won't have healed, but they will be scars. Does it make it better or worse for them to know why he left? Is it better to think your son left for reasons unknown or to know that he left because some conspiracy theory had driven him mad?

I don't know. It's not my call to make. All I know is that a guy I knew a long time ago got so wrapped up in the things he read on the Internet that he left behind a family that loved him to hop on a Greyhound bus headed for a lonely death in a forest.

And I wish I had more to miss him by than one awkward lunch together and the lingering notion that maybe, just maybe, he's still just pulling a giant prank on everyone.

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A sad story indeed. What's even sadder is how little people know about mental illness or know how to respond to it. It sounds very much like this man had some serious problems and that no one knew exactly what it was there place to do or not do. I can tell you as the parent of a college student it definitely crosses your mind from time to time to wonder how your baby is doing in the grown up world all on their own. For the first time you are out of the loop and you only know what they tell you or choose not to tell you. You have no idea if they are getting to a place where they could use some intervention. And you start to realize that other young college students are often busy dealing with their own issues and don't have the knowledge or life experience to know when something has gone beyond "eccentric" or "down in the dumps", etc. and who to contact if that's the case. I seriously hope that if my child was about to make some big life altering decision someone who knew her would give me a heads up out of concern no matter how old she was. I am not faulting your friend. As I said before it's so hard to know what to do in a case like this and I think guys even more than girls have a kind of "code" where they think it's not their place to interfere. Just a sad, sad story all the way around. I hope that his parents do get whatever he may have left behind. They have so little left now that every little piece that reconfirms that their child was a part of this world is precious.

A beautifully written sad story, BT. Very poignant, and I can see why it would stick in your head, forcing you to tell it. Like sistergoldenhair, I hope Jon's parents are given his things. No one can predict what their reaction to knowing more about his story will be. I would want to know but families are different. The fact that the obituary tells a little about Jon says to me that this family would care about his things and the details of his life. And what you've written tells me that you are a person who wishes things always turned out well, even as you know they don't. I wish that Jon's story had a different ending too.

I remember Morrill Tower. I have forgotten the name of its twin, but we used to call them Sodom and Gomorrah when I lived in Columbus. I thought they were ugly and awful and no place for freshmen on such a big campus. I was inside one of those "suites" a couple of times while I was a student at OSU and working in Hagerty Hall. (I was a freshman at 38 and therefore not exactly a candidate for Tower life.)

Yeah, they were pretty depressing on the inside, but it's cool to see my old dorm on TV during Ohio State games.

The thing you have to know about Jon is that none of us saw it as mental illness. He was just a little weird. But we all were. Phil recorded the most reprehensible rap songs and he loved Japanese stuffed animals. Dave seriously had no idea he smelled so bad - when we called the RA on it, he said a pizza box must be rotting in his room. And one night around 9 p.m., Chris told me he'd never seen New York City. We were on the road there within the hour, spending a day wandering Times Square, sleeping in a truck stop in Pennsylvania and only missing one day of classes. Jon's weirdness was just kind of part of this pattern of bizarre behavior that made us all so close.

Plenty of weirdness on the OSU campus, especially among grad students. I saw more people walking around with their coats buttoned wrong and talking to themselves than I could count. (Now when we think people are talking to themselves, they are usually on the phone.)

I love The Ohio State University though, and am grateful that I had the opportunity to go there and make it through. I was a single mother of four at the time, and two of my kids were at OU then. Totally different educational experiences, but all worthwhile. The jobs I had to pay my way were all great experiences too. One of them was weekend evenings at Children's Hospital, where Woody Hayes was an occasional visitor on the QT. And once he held the door open for me at the Union. He was a much nicer man than many people suspected.

BT, I don't know whether there are any books about life in the Towers or about college experiences like you've had, but I bet there's a market out there. I know you'll keep writing. I'm already picturing a book-signing at the Grandview Cafe, one of my favorite near-campus spots. :>)